Let Twitter Tell You Where to Invest Your Money

Want to stay ahead of the Dow Jones? Apparently, the new way to do it is to pay attention to Twitter. A paper from the Universities of Indiana and Manchester called “Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market” seems to suggest that the overall mood of the social network is a surprisingly good indicator of where the market will go soon afterwards. Academics Johan Bollen, Huina Mao and Xiao-Jun Zeng tracked 10 million tweets from 2.7 million people in 2008 and discovered that the Tweet crowds appeared to accurately predict the daily up and down changes in closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average 87.6% of the time.